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rTaste: Do Research Agents Have Taste? Evaluating Early Stage Research Judgment

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The paper "rTaste: Do Research Agents Have Taste? Evaluating Early Stage Research Judgment" investigates whether advanced language models can act as research agents that propose and rank minimum viable experiments (MVEs) for recent NLP papers. Six frontier models were given seven papers and tasked with forecasting experiment outcomes and ranking them; a separate executor ran all MVEs and auditors evaluated the results. Of 415 MVEs, 194 were deemed sound, valuable, and new, but only 73 were judged beyond the seed paper and non‑obvious; while agents’ first choices matched auditors’ top picks more often than random, they did not outperform simple heuristics, and team models added cost without clear quality gains. "whyItMatters":"The study provides a dataset and evaluation harness for assessing AI‑driven research planning, highlighting both the potential and current limitations of using language models as research agents."

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